Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist

Around 1495 Giovanni Bellini was the most admired painter in Venice, an old master running a busy workshop whose pupils would include Giorgione and the young Titian. Devotional pictures like this one, the Virgin and the infant Christ with the small John the Baptist, were among the shop's steady work, and scholars think assistants had a hand in parts of the panel. What Bellini brought to such a familiar subject was quiet daylight and real tenderness, the figures set close to us against a strip of Italian countryside. The poplar panel changed hands across Europe for centuries before an Indianapolis collector, George Clowes, acquired it, and the museum there took it into its collection in 2003.